an honest forum for military spouses

For those non-military readers, a “homecoming” is a welcome party for service members returning from deployment, attended by hundreds of friends and family. When I tried to figure out what takes place at a homecoming, I found only lists of instructions on what to wear and what not to wear; how to welcome your sailor home; how to behave during and after the ceremony; and what to expect of your returning service member. You are supposed to look pretty but not slutty. You should have a clean house and your service member’s favorite foods waiting for him. You should expect him to be stressed and not burden him with your worries. Oh, and he may return a different person than the one who left. A lot to take in! I wonder, are service members asked to prepare for the possibility that the families they left behind may have changed in their absences? To demystify the experience of homecoming, I thought I would share my story. In short, I was struck by a few things:How commercialized homecoming is, from the money families are expected to pay to have first dibs at seeing their loved ones, to the advertising opportunities afforded groups who donate refreshments and care packagesHow controlled it is. There are many physical barriers between families and service members, and tightly choreographed ceremonies, despite media portrayals of homecomings as spontaneous expressions of love and prideDespite what a maddening pain in the ass it was to attend an event in the middle of my workday with little advance warning, how glad I was that I attended, both to be among other women and to support Sam.How no homecoming rituals celebrate friendships between and contributions of women and men left behind during deployments. Sam’s homecoming was on a hot early autumn day. A few days beforehand, service members’ families received an e-mail announcing the day and time when the boat would return. I got permission to work remotely to be near the base. I wondered what it would cost the military to give families at least two weeks of advance notice as to the date and time of a ship’s arrival, so that they can arrange to complete work projects and travel. For weeks beforehand, I had been torn about the whole notion of homecoming and what it would mean to celebrate the return of a boat whose function is to prepare for war. I struggled with whether to go at all. I wanted to be there for Sam but I did not want to be perceived as a visible part of the military effort. My friends urged me to follow my heart. My heart was pulling me in different directions. The advice of my friend Renee, another officer’s wife, did it for me: you have to go, she said. Go for Sam but also go for the rest of us. We'll be there. The day of, I was overwhelmed with a work project. So I headed over to the base with my laptop and a foldout chair. When I arrived, a group of families had already assembled. They milled between a tent where Starbucks was serving free coffee and cookies, its logo displayed prominently on the front of a large tent, and the pier, which was bordered by both a chain link fence and beyond that, a four-foot concrete barrier behind which families stood. People held banners that read, “Welcome home, U.S.S Submarine!” and “THANK YOU.” I saw one woman with a pin with a photo of her uniformed husband fastened to her dress, and her two young daughters wore the same. Finally, the submarine inched its way into the pier to cheering. Then, more waiting. Iced coffee, milling around. I answered emails, edited my report. I didn’t know where to put my attention: to the fence, behind which I could see sailors walking on top of the newly docked boat, as if oblivious to the crowd waiting for them, or my iPhone, buzzing away with emails. I finally gave up on work and found Renee and some of the other women. We waited an hour and a half from when the time the boat was supposed to come in until we actually saw the men emerge. Before that, I observed a strange ritual. (First, some background: while the boat was still deployed, a group of spouses from the boat’s Family Readiness Group sold “first kiss tickets,” a lottery that determines who among the families are able to come forth first and be reunited with their sailors. The proceeds benefit the Family Readiness Group, so that in the future they can plan more first kiss ceremonies.) Now the chosen ones stood by the boat, behind the concrete wall, behind the fence, and were allowed to hug their husbands as we villagers looked on. I always thought that public photos of military families being reunited were taken amidst the chaos of many families coming together, no preference shown to some families and no strings attached. Watching families embrace, being closely watched, behind many artificial barriers, I wondered how you could not have the generic happy embrace that everyone expects you to have. No wonder the reunion photos we see on the web look so similar to one another, when in reality, a host of different scenes took place when couples were allowed to reunite with one another in one messy crowd: pecks on the cheek, awkward hugs, tearful reunions, handshakes among men, indeed, in our post Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell days, kisses among male partners, and in most cases, as with Sam and I, quiet reunions as we contemplated where to begin after so much time apart. More waiting. Another officer’s wife came up to me and told me she had been reading my blog, and that it resonated with her. If such a thing is possible, her words retroactively eased my loneliness of the previous six months. Another woman was on the other end of the line feeling some of the same things! Even if Sam hadn’t shown up that day, that small exchange would have made homecoming worthwhile. Renee watched this interaction a few feet away, and winked at me. Her look seemed to say: I told you. You were less alone than you assumed. Finally, anticlimactically, Sam and the other sailors began to emerge from the chain link fence. My friend Renee pointed to him before I spotted him. “There’s Sam! Go to him!” she said, nudging me forward. I heard one of the women next to me say that she felt nauseous. I thought I understood what she meant: there had been a lot of buildup and unnecessary ceremony for an event many of us felt ambivalent about. We wanted to see our loved ones, but how to express to them what the experience had been like for us? I was wearing a tiny sundress, and I momentarily contemplated how I would jump the concrete barrier without exposing myself. I shrugged and hurdled myself over and walked towards Sam. Neither Sam nor I are happiest in a group, so he gently steered me to the side of the crowd where we would be less subject to photographs and the public. No less than three times, individuals wearing uniforms from a local chain store approached us offering free “care packages” of household cleaning supplies in buckets emblazoned with the company’s name. Sam thanked each of them and told them we weren’t interested. At the end of the event, I left on my own while Sam spent several more hours on the boat. I turned to Renee, whom I had become close friends with over the course of the past few months, and we hugged goodbye, as she would soon be moving away. It hit me that this was more than just a reunion with our partners. It was the end of an intense period of inter-reliance on one another. Many of our friendships would remain, but the sense of camaraderie we felt enduring something difficult together would not. I felt a pang of sadness. Note to self for next time: Don’t just plan for Sam’s homecoming, which I had done by baking him cookies and getting the house clean, because one-sided homecoming or not, we both celebrate our reunions at home. Do something for those who have helped you through it. Bake cookies for them. Write notes of appreciation for them. Celebrate their friendship. If anything is humane and sustaining about deployment, it is relationships among people left behind.

A friend recently sent me a photo of this bumper sticker, which he spotted in an upstate New York parking lot:

I felt my friend’s reaction perfectly captured how military culture reduces women’s identities to their marriages, their connection to one of the armed forces, and their government utility as the built-in caretakers who follow where service members go: “I like how it’s not just that her individual identity is doubly subsumed, but that she is, in fact, transformed into transferrable government property!”

I wonder if the owner of the bumper sticker put it there with a sense of pride in her sacrifice. Or if she did so with the sense of sarcasm that I hope she did.

Those of you who read “Military moves…” know that I have been thinking about how DOD policies paint service members’ partners as passive objects along for the ride, so much that the latter are not even informed of—or included in—decisions that determine where their partners move and when. In another stroke of fantastic luck, Sam’s date of transfer to his next job, which had unexpectedly been moved a month earlier a few weeks ago, was moved a month later yet again—to the date the navy originally named.

How did things change again? After Sam and I began operating under the assumption that we would be moving in November rather than December, Sam called the guy who makes the decisions about job placements and reminded him that by official navy regulations he is unable to transfer before December. Whoops! The decision-making-guy responded. Sam got yet another set of orders, the ones that currently stand.

Why did this happen? As with many things in the navy, it happened for an avoidable reason. The office that mails official orders and the guy who actually selects officers’ placements do not always check with one another as they finalize details. Accordingly, Sam got a letter with the wrong date. These careless mistakes have the effect of creating a deep sense of instability and stress, as mentally and logistically, you scramble to adjust multiple full lives to a new timeline.

Numerous factors, including poor communication by military personnel with one another and military families; the language of military documents; and the everyday practices of military families reinforce our assumptions that wives and children are to be moved around at service members' discretion. Take, for example, an excerpt from this navy form letter to newly assigned service members, which reads:

“If you plan to move your family to this area, I recommend you contact the Naval District Washington Housing office….If you elect not to move your family….”

It is exactly these subtle, repeated turns of phrase that reinforce families’ subordinate status. They certainly don’t help.

On the contrary, if the military were interested in empowering its families and reinforcing service members’ respect for their partners’ agency, they would user letters like these to emphasize that decisions like moves are mutual.

That military families consider service members without wives as in need of assistance with domestic tasks is another strong indicator of the helpmate/follower role we assume women to play. When Sam was stationed at a different base before we met, the wives of other officers used to bring him casseroles because they worried that he would go hungry without a woman to cook for him. Likewise, his boat’s current “Family Readiness Group” arranged for “single” (read: unmarried) sailors to receive care packages of groceries upon their return home from deployment. Never mind that some of them, Sam included, are perfectly adept at shopping and cooking for themselves, and for their partners who might be the ones who need nurturing after scrambling into town in time for their return.

As well-meaning family and friends shake their heads at the sacrifices I will make as a “navy wife,” I’d like to make one thing clear. After the move I will make with Sam in December, I am staying put. It is our mutual understanding that Sam, as the one who has chosen this career that has him moving every 2-3 years, will revolve geographically around me and our children for the next few years, and not the other way around. Will this be hard? You bet. But we’ve each had harder things to deal with. What’s more, one of the reasons why Sam asked me to marry him is because he knows I have goals of my own, and it would be professionally and emotionally debilitating if I were to up and go to every place he gets sent to.

It is true that this decision will present its own complications, not the least of which is judgment by other military families for your choices. But check out this affirming but honest online discussion among women and men whose families have made that choice, led by a woman who hilariously calls her navy husband “He of the Sea.” At least, it presents staying put as no crappier than the other crappy choice the military leaves families.

As for those who assume that constant relocations by family members is best: Just pull a few military wives and moms aside, away from one another’s censoring gaze, and ask them how they and their kids are doing as daddy comes and goes without warning, in communities that are unfamiliar to them. I guarantee their responses will complicate the assumption that military families should relocate together.

Why, then, after mercilessly unpacking a three-word “army wife” bumper sticker, do I insist on using the term “navy girlfriend” as a title for this blog? I use the term ironically, as a starting point for highlighting just how loaded and fraught with problematic assumptions our treatment of military families is. When Sam and I marry, I will be a walking example of a mouthy, irreverent navy wife, charting my own complicated course alongside my husband, rather than sitting in the back of the boat and massaging his shoulders while he steers.

One of the surest signs of inequality within navy couples is how difficult it is to get ahold of your partner when he’s on a submarine.

When I am at work in my office building, Sam has three direct ways to reach me: email, my cell phone, and my office phone. When I’m at a meeting, I turn my cell phone off, unless I’m expecting an important call either from him or a colleague. If that meeting needs to be interrupted, then no one bats an eye. In fact, I have interrupted multiple important meetings in order to go talk to Sam when he pops up in port.

When a submarine is in port, the men working inside it have no cell phone access, and there are no more than a small handful of land lines on the boat for a crew of 100+ men. Very recently, I learned that the guys also can access Gmail on one computer on the boat, though Sam has only used this once, when looking for news of whether I reached a foreign destination safely. What does this mean? It means that when I do want or need to reach Sam, I feel really awkward. Usually it is not he who picks up, and the officer who does disappears for a few minutes to find Sam before telling me that he is unavailable. Now, when you call your partner at work, it’s often not because you just want to chat a bit: there are usually questions or news, about a trip you are scheduling, you or a family member not feeling well, a conflict at work or something else that happened that made you frustrated. Sometimes you’re just exhausted and you want to hear his voice. You don’t always want to talk to a strange man who responds to you with monotone indifference and will tell you your partner cannot come to the phone. Today, after a particularly long day of meetings for work, I just wanted to chat with Sam. Normally my tendency is to wait for him to call, when he is out of work or at least up on the pier, outside the submarine. This evening, I decided, to hell with it, I’m calling the damn boat as though it were any other workplace. The officer who answered the phone and rattled off his long title gave a short little laugh when I told him it was Sam’s fiancé calling, and asked me to hold on. A second later, I heard Sam’s voice on the phone, low and tense. He told me that he couldn’t talk, and he would call back in a few minutes.

When he did call back, he apologized for not being able to talk. Then he told me that there were about 15 minutes during that day when it would be a bad time for me to call, and I called during that time. He explained that his captain was giving a tour of the ship to some senior officers, and that when the phone rang, the only other sound in the room was the captain speaking. In short, I had embarrassed him. I am fairly sure that Sam meant his comment to be an apologetic way of explaining why he could not talk to me. Yet given the context, I felt like the inappropriate intruder.

What context do I mean? I mean how much submariners are already cut off and out of contact: the multiple wire fences and concrete walls of the base surrounding their boats; the six month deployments; the 16-hour days; the lack of any but the mostsuperficial, procedural information about what exactly it is they do each day. When you deign to interrupt their all-male, steel-encrusted secret society, you do not want to be told that you are getting in the way.

The only thing worse than having your partner’s next job orders suddenly changed without warning, is learning of this when you are apart. Still on deployment, Sam wrote me from a foreign port to tell me that the “verbal orders” he received from his captain to report in January to a new job in Washington state have changed.

A few months ago, Sam had happily announced that he indeed got the location that we had both been rooting for, and an interesting job placement that would have sane hours. We relaxed and began to plan our lives. I now knew that Sam would be relocating from his current base, which is near where I live and work, towards the end of my current job contract; and that I would soon be able to follow him there. We would have a few months after deployment to relax, spend weekends doing normal things like grocery shopping and watching television, and lazily contemplate the kind of place we would like to purchase together. I cannot overemphasize the sense of security and peace this concrete date and location gave me at a time when I never know where my partner is in the world and when I will speak with him next.

Shortly after these reassuring “verbal orders,” Sam’s captain announced that someone else had filled the job that Sam had been given, and that his new job placement would be different—likely the same general area, but a different job and a different start date. A month and a half passed during which we heard nothing. Sam tried to contact the detailer, the guy who makes job placements, who seems to be perpetually away from his desk. We put on hold our definitive plans to move, our plans to take a Christmas vacation, and even our plans to get married, because where we would be and when was totally up in the air.

Alas, today, while I am in a foreign country for work and Sam is on the boat, he writes me an email announcing that his placement will be in the same general metro area, but one month earlier, and in a different, smaller city.

I imagine I should consider myself lucky. Sam still got placed in the same area, and it’s only a month earlier. But in the military, ordinary, humdrum life as a couple becomes as rare and precious as diamonds, and we just lost a month of that time. This change means:

That we will have to start house hunting a month earlier, and almost immediately after Sam and I are reunited after deployment.That we will likely miss our chance to spend both Thanksgiving and Christmas together, because this will be precisely the time when Sam will be expected to relocate and begin a new job.

That Sam’s relocation will fall smack in the middle of minor, but significant surgery I have planned, during which I need Sam to be present and a source of emotional and logistical support.

That a visit Sam’s family was planning will now likely need to be postponed as we prepare to move instead.

We all know that service members are not just isolated individuals but parts of relationships, with people who have their own needs and expectations. But popular culture tends to take for granted that the partners of military service members are fully along for the ride—as does, clearly, the military. Most blogs on the topic of military moves encourage spouses to buck up and deal with the challenges, 1950s-housewife-style smiles on their faces, rather than critiquing the simple things the military could do to make life for military families more humane.

Most critically, I mean accountability to detailers to keep service members and their partners, married or not, duly informed about the plans underway for their next move. Even if there is no decision yet, we should be able to call someone and receive prompt replies as to when a decision will be made. This is not an unreasonable request. That the military gives service members so little say in moves and ignores families altogether is a significant enough issue that we should not take for granted as necessary, but that is a whole other topic. That the whole decision making process is so vague amounts to manipulation and negligence.

Because there is another, less concrete cost to a change as seemingly minor as learning your fiancé will transfer a month earlier than expected: At moments like this, I feel as though I am the mistress to a man who is already married to the navy, and as though the navy is a capricious, domineering wife whose word is law. Sam admittedly has little control over what the navy tells him to do, and he tries his damndest to keep me informed as soon as he knows something. But he does have the privilege of being inside the closed hatch of a submarine while he discusses what decisions have and have not been made with his colleagues. In a life when your partner is already so removed from you, having access neither to the people making the placement decisions nor your partner himself feels doubly alienating.

About

This is a blog about my experiences as the wife of a naval officer.

However, I would prefer if it were no longer about my experiences ONLY.

I want this to be an open forum for partners and spouses of military service members from all branches and ranks - including officer and enlisted - to speak openly about their experiences as family members of those serving in the armed forces.

You need not share my perspectives and views. The only requirement is that you are honest and have something original to say.

Please submit your story to rockingtheboat2013@gmail.com, and I will be in touch.